


Dybbuk

by Lasgalendil



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Political Animals, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Fusion, American Politics, Antisemitism, Body Horror, Drug Use, HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Infant Death, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Newborn Children, Pregnancy, Queer History, Religious Discussion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-08-28 23:36:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 6,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16732803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasgalendil/pseuds/Lasgalendil
Summary: Something wicked is coming for TJ Hammond.





	1. Prologue

1943

 

Hadassah Barnes married Adam Barrish at Union Temple, but her brother missed the ceremony. He was in Northern Africa first, then Italy, storming the beaches of Salerno. When Adam broke the glass beneath his heel, she heard the harsh crack of gunfire.

* * *

 

1945

 

There was a ceremony at Arlington. An empty casket. A Christian grave.

 

Bucky hadn’t believed in God. Steve had been raised Roman Catholic, his adult beliefs more a mixture of stubborn optimism, socialism, and Irish superstition. She didn’t know if there were life after death, a God above...but wherever it was that souls went, she prayed theirs ended up there together.

 

In Brooklyn, Agent Carter had appeared on her parents’ doorstep, impeccable as her pictures. Shared a Shabbat meal and her stories, held the child named for the only woman in the Howling Commandos.

 

“I’d be flattered if I weren’t so frightened. I’m afraid children aren’t my forte. But I do know this much,” Peggy Carter promised her. “With the Barnes’ blood and my name? She’ll be a bloody handful.”

* * *

 

1960’s

 

Margaret Elizabeth Barrish came of age with none of her godmother’s academic proclivities but every ounce of her ambition. Lived wildly. Loved deeply. Her formative years left a string of skipped shul services, Vietnam protests, arrest records, broken hearts and a bastard child in their wake.

 

And if she ended up a working mother, stayed a showgirl in Vegas, never made it to the bright lights of Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard like Miss Martinelli or Marilyn Monroe had, well. She had no one to blame but herself. She’d gotten as far as Vegas then met a man with a charming smile and an embouchure to die for. Margaret Barrish could face up to her own failures. What she wouldn’t stomach was to become someone else’s success. Those schmucks Howard Stark and Hugh Hefner could kiss her ass. Sure, she bedded men—many, many men—but it was her body, her choice, and for nobody’s business but her own damn pleasure.

 

Margaret Barrish had no illusions she was the world’s greatest mother. She was addicted to the spotlight, the attention and adulation of men, joined with a flask at the hip. But she didn’t have to be perfect to be a mother, just prayed she’d be good enough.

* * *

 

1981

Elaine Barrish grew up without a father and had never needed one. There was nothing in life but children, Mom said, a woman wanted from a man that she couldn’t do herself.

 

...If she’d had one, he might have warned her about men like Bud Hammond. Mom knew what he was, of course, Mom had always had a good sense for men, the hustlers and the heartbreakers. But Bud was young and handsome and articulate and driven and Elaine was headstrong and hungry and just so goddamned in love. But in those moments under the chupah where he promised her forever with his slow, liar’s smile, being young and handsome and filled with fierce ambition felt like it would be enough.

 

And for a while, it was.


	2. Chapter 2

1982

 

Politicians had wives. Women had children. If Bud were to reach office, if she were ever to run in her own right, she’d be damned by the public as either a frigid shrew or an uncaring parent.Her own mother hadn’t been particularly maternal, but Elaine Barrish had never half-assed anything in her life. Better now while her body was still young and forgiving. Better now than the years to come, campaigning on the road. She was top of her class all throughout law school and still carried two sons to term.

 

She’d been on the bench when their labor started. Felt a twinge deep within her, a trickle, and then a flood. Stood and interrupted the cross council.

“Your honor, a recess?”

There was silence. A patronizing frown from both judge and ADA. “Mrs. Hammond, this is highly unusual—”

“It’s Ms. Barrish. And I am highly pregnant.”The unflappable court clerk had caught her eye, and for the citizens of Wake County, that was the beginning of the legend and legacy of Future First Lady Elaine Barrish Hammond. Her sass had been recorded and would become enshrined within the public record, quoted back to her on the campaign trail from the rural counties of North Carolina all the way to the White House.

* * *

 

Elaine Barrish gave birth to twin boys: Thomas James. Douglas Adam. 

Tommy was older by minutes, and from even before the moment he’d left her womb he’d been fighting for his life. Dougie had been pulled from her pink, happy, and healthy. Tommy had been whisked away to the NICU before she could hold him, even before he’d taken his first breath.

The neonatologists at Duke University called it “twin-twin transfusion syndrome.” 

Bud looked down at the wrinkled little hand curled around his finger and called it a goddamn miracle.


	3. Chapter 3

1983

 

Elaine Barrish had two sons: Cain and Abel. Jacob and Esau. Her two boys couldn’t be more different.

Dougie gained weight. Smiled.Sat up, crawled, began talking when he was supposed to. Walked well before he turned one. Tommy did not.

* * *

 

Elaine Barrish had a dream where she was falling, a blue coat, a bloodied arm, bone snapping through her skin, felt the impact into the river ice below. Dreamed she dragged herself out of the frigid water, a cold so deep it settled into her bones, seared into her very soul.

 

Elaine woke. She was in her room, Bud beside asleep beside her. She was safe. She sat up, sweaty and heaving, and there was a dead man in the doorway. He called out to her: _Laney—!_

 

Elaine Barrish woke with her heart in her throat and an overwhelming, primal instinct to see her son . She found Tommy half dead in his cradle, unbreathing. Couldn’t wake him no matter how hard she tried.

 

At the hospital, the doctors called it “apnea”, a possible precursor to SIDS. But Bud Hammond put his foot down, played the Mayor card, said their son wouldn’t be leaving until they’d been given answers. Tests were run. Blood was taken. But even then no diagnosis was forthcoming. The doctors scratched their heads. In the end, it was labelled“a failure to thrive.”

* * *

 

Bubbe Barrish called it the Evil Eye. Mom said that was all nonsense, of course, but for the first few years Elaine would find salt in Tommy’s pockets, the corners of the nursery, couldn’t quite bring herself to wipe away the ash placed on his forehead. Whatever strange protection superstition could offer…well. Elaine wasn’t a religious person, read only enough Hebrew to have a Bat Mitzvah and hadn’t touched a Bible since Bud’s swearing in, but she prayed to her idea of G-d and how she related to her that it would be enough.


	4. Chapter 4

1983

 

Elaine Barrish was a practicing attorney, wife to the Mayor of Raleigh with gubernatorial ambitions, and a full-time mother of two. Each job kept her busier than the last. She coped with the guilt by being the best mother she could; Bud dealt with it by lavishing them all with ridiculous gifts, let his boys want for nothing and get away with murder.

 

And speaking of murder…

 

“A Bucky-bear, Bud, really?” Elaine’s nose wrinkled in distaste as he laid the plush toy down on her desk. It was well past midnight, and he’d only just gotten home.

“It was either this or Captain Ameribear,” Bud shrugged. “I used to have a wife who laughed at my jokes. What happened to her?”

Elaine slipped down her glasses. “I used to have a husband with a sense of humor. What happened to him?”

He came around the desk and knelt, gaze gone wolfish. “Alright, Sugar. I’ll humor you.”

“Bud Hammond, you old hound dog, you keep your hands to yourself!” Elaine protested, however nominally. “I have to finish this docket!”

“Well, don’t let this old hound dog stop you,” Bud said, running hands up her skirt, settling his face between her thighs.

 

And in that moment, young and handsome and so goddamned good to her felt like it could be enough.


	5. Chapter 5

1984

 

Tommy didn’t talk until he was two. They had to separate the boys during his speech therapy, or Dougie would do all the talking for him. But when Tommy did talk it was just like when he’d finally taken his first steps: one day he was crawling, and by the week’s end he was running and climbing, more sure of himself and steady than even Dougie. Tommy didn’t have first words, he had a full sentence. She read from the Little Critter books Mom had sent with their Hanukkah gelt (“Because fuck Shel Silverstein. What’s he trying to teach children, anyway?”), smiled sadly at the memories, tucked him into bed the same as any other night when Tommy said “Mama, I’m cold.”

* * *

 

The backseat of a car was no place for a bedtime, but Elaine Barrish would be damned if she abandoned her boys behind the excuse of being a working mother. When she or Bud were working late, either Mom or one of the nannies would drive the boys to the Court House, District Attorney’s Office, the County jail. Tonight she’d slipped out of the Governor’s gala, gave quick goodnight kisses in her cocktail gown.

Dougie slept in his carseat like a snoring brick. She’d shaken Tommy awake from night terrors.

Next year, she told herself,In Jerusalem.


	6. Chapter 6

1985

 

It took a year of blood, sweat, and tears, but neither Elaine Barrish nor Bud Hammond had ever met an obstacle powerful enough to stand in their way. There was an election, an inauguration, and that January they moved into the Executive Mansion in Raleigh.

Elaine tucked her boys in in their own proper bedrooms that first night and Dougie said, “I love you.”

She kissed Tommy, and he clung to her, begged her not to go. Later he’d crawled into their bed, woke her and Bud up to say, “Mama, there’s a man in my room.”

Bud checked the closet. Under the bed. The dresser drawers. Elaine tucked him back in, kissed him goodnight, promised her little boy that no one was there.

But she remembered a dream so vivid it had terrified her, waking to the whisper of her name.

* * *

 

That night she rode Bud in the master bedroom, made him come until he cried. He slept beside her, his hunger sated, resting after the first step on their long road to Pennsylvania Avenue. She stood before the Queen Anne windows and smoked, roused and sleepless with sex. Here she was, a Jewish woman and her husband, Governor and First Lady of a Secessionist State. She stared out at Burke Square, tried not to think about the men and women who had lived and died in chains, the prison labor that had built the bricks, the confederate soldiers who had trained in what was now her front lawn only a hundred and twenty-some years ago. Bud was all sweet-talk and Southern Charm, had wormed his way into the Tar Heel State’s heart the way he hadhers: slowly and inexorably. But the irony that the family farm still stood, an antebellum plantation house on the national register of historic places, that the Hammond wealth and name were built on the backs of generations of slaves and sharecroppers did not escape her.


	7. Chapter 7

1985

Bubbe Barrish died. They flew to New York City and buried her the next day. It was the first time she’d set foot in temple in years. The boys were subdued, didn’t really understand, tried their best to pay attention through the Kaddish, kept fidgeting with the ribbons on the right side of their chests.At the cemetery, Tommy asked if Bubbe Barrish would be lonely, if she would be cold all alone down there in the dark.

Mom knelt, took his chin in her hands. “They buried her in a blanket,” she said. “So she’ll stay warm enough. And look at that, she’s with her sisters! They’ll keep her company.”

“‘Kay,” Tommy sniffled.

“It’s raining,” Dougie shifted from foot to foot. “Can we go back to Nana’s house, now?”

“Alright, alright you little shits,” Mom said. “Quit your kvetching.”

Tommy took her hand. “Are you crying, mama?”

“She’s not crying,” Mom ruffled Tommy’s hair. “She’s got salt in her eyes and pepper up her nose.”

“Nana, that’s silly!” Tommy protested.

“Where’d she get it?” Dougie pouted.

“You’d better watch that one,” Mom said, pulling a flask from her pocketbook as they walked through the drizzle back to the car. “He’s got your sense and your sense of humor…although it’s about time you learned what a pain in the ass you were at that age.”

“Mother, it’s hardly the time.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I’m a different person when I’ve been drinking…and she wants a drink, too.”

Elaine went rigid. “My grandmother just died.”

“And we’re alive,” Mom insisted. “I’ve got you, kiddo, and two grandsons, and I’m going to celebrate while I can. Even if it means putting up with that son of a bitch.”

Bud shook his head from the backseat, the boys asleep on either side of him. “Now, Margaret, I’ll have you know my mama was a god-fearing woman.”

“Well, if I’d given birth to a snake I’d be afraid, too.”

“Will the two of you just stop it?”

Bud only laughed. “If she wants to rattle me, she’ll have to try harder, Sugar.”

“Oh, alright,” Mom sighed. “I’ll behave if he does.”


	8. Chapter 8

1985

There was sitting shiva and prayers from flitting moments of her childhood. Mom had never been particularly religious or observant, but some of Elaine's earliest memories were of Bubbe Barrish and this old house. The evening waned and so did the visitors, and Elaine found herself in Bubbe Barrish’s attic as Bud tucked the boys into bed. She rummaged idly throughkeepsakes and faded photographs, staring at a family and faces she’d largely never known.

“I was never close to her, you know,” Mom said from the doorway. “Or you. It’s not my nature. I tried, didn’t do my damnedest but I did try.”

“Do you need help with the packing?”

“No, honey. I’m donating whatever’s interesting to the Smithsonian, and the synagogue can have the rest. I’m sure they’ll find a use for it.”

“Bud and I have been talking,” Elaine set the photo album down and broached the subject just as cautiously. “About you. Moving in with us.”

“Down in the Bible belt, honey? I don’t think so. Talk to me when you’re governor of New York or California or someplace interesting. And less anti-semitic.”

Elaine smiled despite herself. “Mom, I’m serious. I want the boys to have more time with you.”

Mom shook her head. “Oh, alright, you’ve gone and convinced me. But I won’t live in a mother-in-law apartment. Bud Hammond might have fathered my grandchildren but I won’t share a roof with him. I can’t stand that son of a bitch. Never could.”

“It’s nice to hear your opinion on my fidelity, mother.”

“A woman has needs is all I’m saying. Which is why I could never stay married.”

“Not that you tried,” Elaine said.

“I’ve been loyal to two things in my life, honey. One of them’s blood and other starts with a ‘b’,” she took another shot.

That wrest a smile from her.

“It’s just—“ Mom began, suddenly serious like Elaine had never seen her. “Seeing her there, all of them together, and thinking about James…well. I’m mad as hell.”

“She never talked about him,” Elaine offered.

“No,” Mom said, sitting beside her, running fingers over the faded family portrait, three little girls and a boy who looked so much like her Tommy. “No, she never did.”


	9. Chapter 9

1985

For Christmas, Bud took them down to Disneyland. Elaine fought him bitterly, but Bud said if they wanted to go anywhere further in US politics she had to be make an effort to be “less conspicuously un-Christian.” There was already a tree up in the Mansion, although she’d been insistent there be a menorah in the window as well. They had a Christmas trip instead of celebration as a compromise, and in the end it left no one happy.Elaine got sunburned, Dougie threw up on Pirates of the Caribbean, and Bud spent half the trip in the hotel on the telephone. Tommy cried for hours because he wanted to ride the Cyclone.

 

She called Mom at her wit’s end, but she only confirmed what Elaine already knew: the Cyclone was at Coney Island. It rained all week when Bubbe Barrish died. Her boys had never been.


	10. Chapter 10

1986

That next spring Bud wanted the boys to play football. Tossing a pigskin was a rite of passage in the South, and the First Sons would not be exempt. Elaine watched with trepidation as her boys struggled through the Little League season. Dougie wasn’t interested in sports, but he would do anything to please his father, even if it meant he’d be sweaty and sunburned and miserable with grass stains from knees to elbows.Tommy could care less. Let his mind wander. Fumbled passes and forgot plays. Sat through the season on the bench, content to be daydreaming. But baseball was different. Baseball made him light up, and Elaine resigned herself to long innings at Durham Athletic Park where her ass hurt and her shoulders were sore. Even at home Bud would watch games with Tommy, bought him every book in the children’s section about Jackie Robinson. In the few, precious evenings they had together as a family the two of them could read together for hours.

 

…and G-d help anyone who came between the television or radio and the Los Angeles “Brooklyn!” Dodgers.

* * *

 

 

Mom bought them art lessons and watercolors. Dougie splattered colors with more enthusiasm than skill. The American flag. The mansion. The Tar Heel emblem.He painted a stick figure in red and blue with a circle shield and said, “Mommy, look! It’s Captain America!” Mom had sewed him a costume for Purim that year.

Elaine leaned over to see Tommy’s paper, and her heart stopped cold. He’d drawn a dead man in a blue coat. His left arm was missing, sleeve ending in a bloody stump. But that wasn’t even the most horrible part: he’d painted a whole family of stick figures in black and white stripes with six sided stars. 

Elaine asked him who they were, knuckles white on the edge of the table. “Nana’s cousins,” Tommy continued coloring without looking up. “Hitler killed them.”

“They’re too young to hear about that!” she raged.

“I only ever told them about their Uncle,” Mom insisted, as close to tears as Elaine had ever seen her. “I never said Shoah. I never told them that they died.”

* * *

Elaine herself had been a teenager when she’d discovered the weathered old photos in Bubbe Barrish’s attic. There’d been letters and one faded photo tucked away in the back as though buried. Three young girls, faces all unfamiliar: Rivkah, Jutka, Shoshka.  1935. Berlin.

She’d known the family had been Jewish, of course. But she’d never thought to question. Had always just assumed.

But Winnifred Goldberg-Barnes hadn’t been an only child.

There was another photo, another face, one Elaine recognized from the history books. Bubbe Barrish never once talked about it. But when James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes died just three days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, there’d been an H on his dog tags and a mezuzah on the chain.  Her great-uncle had been the only Jewish Howling Commando, but the US government had buried an empty casket in Arlington in a Christian grave. Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were the quintessential American heroes. They had been White. They had been Protestant. Had been like brothers. Everyone knew that. 

(There were other rumors, of course, darker whispers about the pair of them. But if anyone had known if Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes really had been queer for each other, it would have been Bucky Barnes’ kid sister.)

He’d been drafted, lost cousins at Auswichtz, been tortured by the Reich yet still went back to war.  It made his death all the more bitter, all the more unfair to be the only Howling Commando to give his life, that he should suffer so much but never live to see  the Shoah’s end.


	11. Chapter 11

1987

Bud’s campaign manager wanted her to quit working. “You’re the First Lady,” they said. “It’s a full time commitment.”

“The public sees you as a neglectful mother.”

“They want to know why you haven’t changed your name.”

“They want you by Bud’s side, not on his cabinet.”

And so Elaine had styled her hair different, wore softer suits, higher shoes, donned mascara and pearls for every public appearance, stopped defending the poor and played the gracious host instead, saw her smile in the mirror and wanted to be sick. But the public loved her for it, and she went from Bud’s equal to his brood mare in their eyes. It was a part she was willing to play, however bitterly, but she’d be damned if she let her position affect her boys. They’d been born into this mess, hadn’t agreed to it. Elaine Barrish Hammond played the doting wife, hosted dinners and galas and spoke to the society pages, but she was reticent when it came to her two sons. “They’re children, not celebrities,” she told the Times regarding their absence. “When I married Bud it was knowing we were going to the White House someday, and I’d be right there with him. But our sons are different. They didn’t choose their parents. All I ask is that our two boys be given a normal, happy childhood.”


	12. Chapter 12

1988

The next year, she left the boys with Mom, a VCR, and a box of Disney movies and headed off to the DNC. Bud was giving a speech, the sort of thing that could get them noticed nationally, maybe even the nomination in ’92.

The boys went through Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella. The Sword in the Stone. Dougie was at that adventurous age, wanted to be the knight in all of the fairy tales, slay the monsters, marry a princess. When Mom asked Tommy if he was going to marry a princess, too. Tommy scrunched up his nose, said “They kill queers, Nana,” and went back to his music. Mom called them at the hotel, furious, spewed profanities at Bud, interrogated the nannies until they fled in tears, insisted they fire the security, drivers, switch the boys’ school. It wasn’t until years later—ten years later, the year Tommy would be forced to come out—that Mom finally told her the reason why. 


	13. Chapter 13

1989

 

When the Wall fell, Tommy had night terrors about Russians for weeks. It wasn’t the first time Elaine put her little boy in therapy. It wouldn’t be the last.

* * *

 

A new Disney feature came out only a week later. Dougie loved The Little Mermaid. Said he wanted to marry Princess Ariel when he grew up, be brave like Prince Erik. He begged and begged for the Barbies until even Bud had relented. She hoped it could be a distraction for Tommy, too, but he’d cried in the theater and Mom had to take him home. The sea witch had terrified him with all her long black legs and her talk of souls. 

“It’s just a story. Just a cartoon. It’s not real, Tommy,” Elaine tried to comfort him. “It’s pretend. It’s make-believe.”

“Don’t worry, Tommy! Prince Erik will protect us!” Dougie insisted, bouncing on the bed.. “He’s really brave! You didn’t see but he drives a ship and he kills her and lightning and they get married happily ever after the end,” he rushed all in one breath. “I promise.”

“He is real handsome,” Tommy relented.

“Yeah! He’s handsome and strong and brave,” Dougie said. “So don’t be afraid, alright?”

“Alright.”

“‘Kay. Night?”

“Night.”

“Are souls real?” Tommy wondered as she tucked him in. Elaine had no idea how to answer.

“Some people think so,” Mom shrugged, as if it were that simple. “Some people don’t. What do you think?”

“I think they’re real,” Tommy shuddered. “I’ve seen one.”

“You’ve seen one?” Elaine asked, alarmed. Imaginary friends were normal, the psychologist had assured her. But spirits? Souls? Her Tommy’s imagination didn’t create friends, it gave him nightmares. “Where?”

“There,” Tommy pointed to his own reflection in the mirror.

“That’s your reflection,” Elaine said. “It’s just a mirror.”

“No. It’s a soul,” Tommy insisted. “It’s Uncle Bucky. I see him.”

“Okay, it’s Uncle Bucky. How do we make him go away?” Mom took it all in stride. Her mother was so much better at this than Elaine was. It made her jealous, a ridiculous stab of envy for their ease of conversation, a bitter nostalgia for that motherly, maternal woman who was never there for her.

Tommy bit his lip. “When Bubbe Barrish died he went away.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, kiddo. We’ll just cover up the mirror again. Then do you think you can sleep?”

“He’s still here, nana.” Tommy whispered.

“That’s your shadow you little shit,” Mom ruffled his hair. “See?”

“No,” Tommy insisted. “It’s Uncle Bucky.”

“Uncle Bucky is dead,” Elaine tried to explain. “Like Bubbe Barrish.”

Tommy shook his head. “They put him in a box but they didn’t bury him. They didn’t give him a blanket. He’s all alone and cold.”

“It’s scary what happened to Uncle Bucky, huh, kiddo?” Mom soothed. “And it’s real, it’s not pretend. But your Uncle Bucky’s dead now. He can’t get hurt and he can’t hurt you.”

“Where do souls go?” Tommy asked instead.

Mom said, “Some people think they go to the World to Come.”

“What if they don’t go to the World to Come? What if they stay.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Tommy,” Elaine tried to dissuade him.

But Mom continued, “Some people think they wait for a year. Then they go to the World to Come.”

“But what if they’re stuck and they don’t go? What happens? Do they wait forever?”

“That’s a question for the UAHC, kiddo,” Mom laughed. “You’re so damn Jewish, what are we going to do with you?”

“Will you stay?” Tommy clutched her hand.

“Alright, you little shit, I’ll stay. Do you want to sleep in bed or the rocking chair.”

“No,” Tommy insisted, terrified. “Not the chair.”

“It’s okay, kiddo,” Mom assured her. “I’ve got this. Alright,” she bundled herself into Tommy’s twin bed. “Storytime. What should we pick? Is it going to be Jackie Robinson or Jackie Robinson?”

* * *

“Do you really believe that?” Elaine asked her later. “Life after death, that sort of thing.”

“Honey, I don’t know what I believe in,” Mom shrugged her off. “But little boys sure as hell shouldn’t go to bed scared. The rest really doesn’t matter.”

“You’re so damned Jewish,” Elaine repeated. “What are we going to do with you?”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“You’d drink anyways.”


	14. Chapter 14

1991

 

Kuwait. Iraq. Desert Storm.

Tommy had dreams of sand and snipers, mass graves and men in gas masks. His teachers called him ‘sensitive’. His classmates called him ‘sissy’. His therapists called it secondary traumatization. 

“Traumatized? What’s the boy ever done to be traumatized?” Bud argued. “It’s bullshit, sugar.”

“Bullshit?” Dougie piped.

“He means hogwash,” Elaine corrected.

“Sugar, when I say bullshit, I mean bullshit. Besides, the boy’s nearly nine. Let him swear.”

“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…” Dougie chanted a gleeful chorus over NPR.

Tommy was silent the whole way home. 

 


	15. Chapter 15

1991

She fucked up. She’d fucked up so bad. Let Bud and his campaign manager sweet talk her,  let them put the boys on camera. She’d never forgive herself for putting her boys on camera. CNN asked if Dougie and Tommy were excited for Bud to run. Dougie was a natural, smiled shyly at the camera, flushed at the reporter’s shoulder pads and lipstick. Said yes, because his daddy was the best daddy and best governor of North Carolina ever so he would be the best president ever, too.

"No," Tommy stared blankly into the camera, tears running down his cheeks. “They’ll shoot him. She was screaming. There was so much blood.”

 

They cut the feed, but the damage was done.

 

She’d only been a child herself when Kennedy had been killed. Had lived the sheer, visceral terror of it all.Elaine shouted at their teachers for showing that footage. Complained to the school board. Her sons didn’t need nightmares of Jackie’s anguish, the bloodstains on her coat during Johnson’s swearing in.Not so young. Not with Bud running. Not after what had happened to Reagan.

* * *

 

Bud would go on to win the Democratic nomination by a landslide. Even against Bush he would win the Presidency only by the skin of his teeth. 

(It wouldn’t be right, the conservatives whispered, to put Bud Hammond in office when his son was so afraid. What sort of father would do that to his child? Could he be trusted to lead a nation? And what about the sanctity of the Second Amendment?)

Elaine didn’t blame Tommy. For years, she wondered if Bud did.


	16. Chapter 16

December 16, 1991

The Secret Service found Bluejay in the kitchen with a knife, sawing through his left shoulder. By the time she got to Tommy he’d already slipped from consciousness. She lost him twice in the ambulance. She lost him again on the operating table.

The neurologists called it “Xenomelia.”

The psychiatrists called it “stress.”

Tommy screamed in the recovery bay that the arm wasn’t his, that it was bad, that it was the arm’s fault Howie had died and  _take it off take it off_  ripped at stitches and IVs bit the nurses thrashed violently had to stay sedated for days.

* * *

 

She’d been so busy between inauguration preparation and Tommy’s surgeries and physical therapy and comforting Dougie it took her weeks to realize he must’ve been talking about Maria Stark and her husband. She told Mom.

“Stark’s death wasn’t widely reported until the following morning,” Mom said. “It took awhile before the investigation labelled it a traffic accident.”

But Elaine Barrish was wife to the President-elect, was better briefed on classified information than her mother or the American public ever were. She knew very well Stark’s death had not been an accident, knew the reason he’d been on a darkened back road in the middle of nowhere, knew that an experimental biological weapon had gone missing in the aftermath, the Starks’ assassin disappearing without a trace. But the call of discovery had been well after midnight. The FBI hadn’t addressed the public until the following morning. Tommy had been in surgery to salvage the arm before the wreckage had even been reported. 

“But he must have done,” Mom convinced herself. “He had to have heard. You never know, honey, his detail could have discussed it.” The two of them sat up all night in uneasy silence.

The next morning there was salt in the corners of the hospital room and ash between his eyes. Tommy smiled and asked her and Mom what had happened to his arm. He said, “That’s funny,” and wondered where Dougie was, and when he could play piano again. 


	17. Chapter 17

1992

She and Mom had bespoke gowns made for the inaugural ball. On the morning of the final fitting, Dougie proclaimed: “They’re really pretty!”

But her Tommy was quiet. Subdued. Elaine put it down to the pain killers, the sling, the stress. She’d learn later that he’d asked Mom why he couldn’t wear a dress, too.

* * *

 

Then the day finally came. Bud’s suit was crisp and conservative. Her own deep blue pant suit was demure and elegant, Mom’s dress eccentric and overstated—so it fit her personality perfectly.

Tommy and Dougie wore identical tuxedos and bowties. Dougie frowned, said it itched and pinched and didn’t fit right, spent the better part of an hour fussing and fidgeting, straightening his tie, flattening his hair despite the stylist’s many ministrations. And Tommy? Tommy hammed it up in front of the mirror, swishing the capelet that covered his left arm and sling proudly. Mom had sewn it out of the same smart blue fabric as Elaine’s suit, had a glittery one with the same deep burgundy pattern as her gown for the evening's Inaugural. 

Bud looked up from last minute edits to his speech as Tommy paraded proudly. “What in tarnation, Margaret? The boy looks like David Bowie.”

“David Bowie, my ass,” Mom grumped around her fourth—or was that fifth?—gin and tonic of the day. The motorcade wouldn’t pick them up for another hour. She’d be well wasted before before Bud was even sworn in. “Kansai Yamamoto would plotz—he’s never designed something so damn conservative in his life.”

“If you say so, Mom,” Elaine sighed as the stylists pinned her hat in place.

“It’s not very—American.” Bud emphasized.Bud Hammond had built his persona and career as a man’s man, the devilish rogue who said what he thought, who took what he wanted, who acted first and asked forgiveness later. That his two sons were so unlike him—so goddamn _effete_ , he’d grumbled drunkenly on more than one occasion—was point of soreness between them. But Tommy was enamored with the cape, had watched Mom measure and stitch the taut fabric. He'd been so ashamed of the cast and sling, the surgeries, shut down and scared, but he shined so bright in his hospital bed when she’d first pinned it on him that Elaine had broke down and cried in the cramped hospital bathroom to see her little boy so alive again.

It’d be a hell of a day and a hell of a night. They couldn’t afford not to have both boys on their best behavior, Bud’s fragile masculine pride be damned. “Well I, for one, think it’s elegant,” Elaine informed him.

“It’s like Uncle Bucky’s jacket—but better!” Dougie insisted. Then: “Why don’t I get one?”

“Well, Dougie, you didn’t want one, you little shit,” Mom laughed. “It’s a little late now.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Here, Dougie,” Bud said in a rare moment of diplomacy. “I’ve got something special you can wear.” He put his pen down and unbuckled the watch on his left wrist. Elaine sucked in a breath: it was a 1922 Rolex, 9 carat yellow gold and blued steel brequet hands with an understated crocodile strap, and the crown of the Hammond family collection. It’d been his grandfather’s, purchased from bootlegging money during the Prohibition, and Bud’s own father had passed it down to him as a good luck charm the morning he’d proposed to her. It’d been on her husband’s wrist the day of their wedding, their anniversaries, for every campaign dinner and debate and inauguration since.

“Oh, Bud—“ Elaine said.

“That’s grandpa Hammond’s watch!” Dougie clapped his hands. “Do I get to wear it? Do I do I?”

Bud laughed and ruffled his hair, whittled a new hole for the buckle tongue with a letter opener. “Well, now, a grown man can’t be afraid to accessorize. Say, Douglas, I ever tell you about the day my daddy gave me this watch—?” 

“Oh, please do enlighten us.” Elaine stopped on Mom’s toes and shot her a glare worthy of the Barrish name. It was a sweet, fatherly moment, one Elaine cherished for years to come.

(But it was also, something uneasy within her whispered, not the first time he’d picked a favorite to dote on.  It wouldn’t be the last.)

* * *

 

If Bud’s pride had been salvaged, other objections weren’t so easily assuaged.  The White House Press Secretary sent a sharp eye over Dougie’s attire with approval, and stopped cold at the sight of Tommy’s.  “It’s just—do you remember Freddie Mercury?” Thomasina pulled her and Mom aside discretely.

“Who?” Mom returned. “What with so many young men dying of AIDS the last few years, it’s hard to keep track.”

“Mom!” Elaine wrest away her drink.

“What, honey?” Mom slurred. “Tell me I’m wrong. Fuck Reagan and fuck Bush and fuck any and everyone who let all those boys die! And I’ll thank you to let me mind my own grandsons, Missy,” she prodded the woman in the center of her chest.

“Mother, you’re worse than Debbie Reynolds."

“Honey, I’m a card carrying member of the cunt club myself,” Mom argued. “But she’s our president.”

“Those boys are about to be in the public spotlight in ways you can’t yet imagine,” Thomasina remained unflappable. “Anything they wear. Anything they say. Any friendships, any romance. They won’t get to be children, and they certainly won’t get to be teenagers. You have to think of these things because the other side will.”

“It’s to cover a medical device, not a _political statement_ ,” Elaine set her jaw. “Surely the pundits will have more substantial things to criticize Bud for—like anything and everything I’ve ever said or worn.”

“You’ve forgotten whether or not your haircut makes you look like a lesbian,” Mom added.“But anyone who wants to go after Tommy will have to get through me,” she promised grimly. “And sweetheart, let me tell you, my Godmother punched out Nazis.”

[This was before the dot com bubble, of course. Before the rise of AOL, chat rooms, message boards…by the end of their tenure Elaine Barrish Hammond would look back on this day bitterly, rue the naivety that she or Mom could ever hope to shield her boys from the hostile eyes or whispers of the world.]

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Freddie Mercury
> 
> Donate to the Mercury Phoenix Trust for HIV prevention and awareness in memory of a beautiful, badass bisexual…and because it will enrage the ghost of Ronald Regan. As Taika Waititi says, “Piss off, ghost!”
> 
> http://www.mercuryphoenixtrust.com


	18. Chapter 18

January 20th, 1992

 

Raise your right hand and repeat after me:

 

I, Donald Thomas Hammond, do solemnly swear

that I will faithfully execute the office the president of the United States

And will, to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States, so help me God.

 

Bud was sworn in on the old Hammond family Bible, on loan from the Wake County Historical Society. Elaine held it as he took the oath. But Elaine’s hands were on it, too—only the Old Testament part, Bud would kid her for years to come—her fingers mingling with his, her wedding ring promising to death do us part. She’d never been so damn proud of him. She’d never been more scared.

Mom dabbed her eyes, although she’d deny it to her dying day. Dougie and Tommy just grinned like fools at all the attention, squinting out at the crowd in the sunlight.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Artistic License TM
> 
> Bill Clinton’s first inauguration was actually January 20th, 1993…but “Mission Report: December 16, 1991” is ingrained in our collective consciousness, so it was easier to change actual history. (Also, I didn’t realize until AFTER I’d started writing this…)
> 
> I don’t like womanizer Bud Hammond, but the fact his first name is “Donald” means I like him EVEN LESS.


End file.
